Concept Of Cinema Research Articles

‘So you see, the story was not quite as you were told’:Maleficent, Dance, Disney, and Cynicism as the Choreo-philosophical Critique of Neoliberal Precarity

Dance bequeaths a conflicted legacy for resisting neoliberalism: the same portfolio careers; pick-up companies; and freelance working practices through which the artist-entrepreneur negotiates and survives the exigencies of the neoliberal market have themselves been co-opted by neoliberal economics as blueprints for labour practices in ways unimagined and never intended by arts practitioners. ‘The freelancer’ to quote Lauren Berlant (76) ‘is one of the sovereign figures of neoliberalism’.1Looking beyond dance's unwitting complicity in the neoliberal contracting of the body, this paper focuses on dance as an emergent critical aesthetics that calls attention to the incorporation of the geopolitical by the post-statist neoliberal project.Its case study is Maleficent ( 2014 ), the Angelina Jolie popular cinema radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of Sleeping Beauty's slighted fairy Carabosse. Maleficent's status as dance intertext is many-faceted: its titular character's conjunction of malevolence and magnificence and the sourcing of her predicament to an originating act of socio-economic disenfranchisement are familiar from the characterisation of Carabosse in Marius Petipa's choreography for the ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Unspecified in the ballet, this act is elaborated in the film: ‘the winged creature who rose to be protector of The Moors, a kingdom which needed neither king nor queen’ to quote the film's narration, Maleficent is shorn of her wings in an act of land-grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence. This act, betokening rape for Jolie, renders Maleficent's aerial choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; everyday and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies, must substitute more mundane mime in their place.This paper begins by establishing the strong bonds which bind Disney to dance; the extent to which, to quote Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, ‘the art of animation…has its forerunner in ballet…At least in Fokine's ballets for Diaghilev…’.2Drawing on analyses of neoliberalism, those of David Harvey in particular, this paper then moves to consider Maleficent as the articulation of a critique of neoliberalism, one which – it will be suggested – relies heavily on Cynic philosophy for its formulation. Cynic philosophy, especially in the extended consideration of the Cynic life presented by Michel Foucault's final series of Collège de France lectures3will be critically important here. Arguing for Maleficent as the choreography of Feminist ethics in response to neoliberal policies that render human relations to the land ever more ethno-biologically precarious, this paper will point up the strong parallels that exist between the film and Cynic thinking. In Foucault's account, Cynicism especially prioritises the vie autre (other life). This makes Cynicism particularly effective as a vehicle for questioning neoliberal values and proposing others in their place.Maleficent's critique will be shown to be choreo-philosophical in the sense that it mobilises, and is highly reliant upon, a range of dance histories – those to do with The Sleeping Beauty especially – and dance practices, particularly those bound up, ultimately, with pantomime dance in Hellenistic ancient Greece. This article will suggest that pantomime dance as a close, cognate ally of Cynic philosophy, was already imbued, in some significant sense, with philosophical intent. It is pantomime dance's philosophical intent – this paper argues – that endures and is mobilised to such effect in the roles of Carabosse and Maleficent. Attention then turns to Alain Badiou's concept of cinema as philosophy. This article will suggest both that Badiou's concept is more indebted to dance than is generally acknowledged, and that it arguably strengthens the sorts of claims that can be made for Maleficent as choreo-philosophical critique. This paper also proposes, in a similar vein, that on the basis of his reading of Cynicism as actually highly motile, the late Foucault is more phenomenological in orientation and – so it would follow – less antithetical to dance and its study, than has hitherto been suggested.

Goodbye to cinema? Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage (2014) as 3D images at the edge of history

This article will analyse Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D feature film, Adieu au langage (2014), as a reflexive meditation on the changing technologies and aesthetics of cinema, in which the history and memory of an entire medium are evoked (or invoked) and reimagined via the apparatus of contemporary 3D imaging. The result is a film that says ‘goodbye’ (per the ‘adieu’ of the film's title) to cinema itself, or at least to a particular conception of cinema and cinematic language (per the ‘langage’ of the film's title), at an end-of-history or end-of-cinema moment at which many, including Godard, have long since proclaimed the medium’s existential demise. Engaging a recurring concern within the director’s oeuvre, Adieu au langage visually and sonically articulates a densely inscribed self-historiography, wherein the now-3D cinematic image maps its own history (or histories, plural), including its evolving technologies, and a broader existential trajectory that spans but also exceeds ‘birth’ and ‘death’ (or ‘deaths’, plural). Positioned between 3D and 2D, present and past, the ‘death’ of cinema and its potential ‘resurrection’, Adieu au langage exists as a revealing historiographic intervention whose 3D images at the edge of history bid ‘adieu’ to cinema to in turn reframe and rearticulate its future.

Feature article: Embodying transnational shared space: Pirjo Honkasalo’s The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

Abstract The article investigates the ways in which Pirjo Honkasalo’s documentary The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2004), examining the impact of the Russian-Chechen war on children, engenders a transnational audience through cinematic qualities, and most importantly through embodiment, producing a strongly affective resonance in the spectator. I argue that through a strategically affective approach to transnationality, the documentary establishes what I call a transnational shared space, structured by a complex dialectics of sharing and non-sharing. My argument revolves around the concept of cinema as a shared space, referring to films that deliberately ‘surround’ the viewer rather than maintain a distance. As the analysis shows, Honkasalo’s documentary pushes the spectator to reflect critically on transnationality and reconsider mass media-created memory of the military conflict. The article addresses issues underlying the film’s ethical quest, such as whether this shared space involves both western (Catholic) and non-western (Orthodox and Muslim) audiences, and what the limits are of transnationalism in documentary film.

Cinematicity: City and cinema after Deleuze

Abstract In light of Deleuze’s conception of cinema as an autonomous thinking machine – a ‘spiritual automaton’ in which moving images are substituted for human thought – the article presents the cinema as a pre-eminent thinker of the city. It contextualizes a range of scholarship committed to exploring the potential of Deleuze’s thought in relation to the ‘cinematic city’ – precipitating a Deleuzian encounter with a process that we have chosen to call cinematicity: the automatic thinking of the city by the cinema. In the course of their remarkable co-evolution, cinema’s unhinging of space– time has projected the unhinging of the space–time of the city, forcing its inhabitants to think otherwise about space, time and the human condition in the machine age. Taking these notions as a point of departure, the contributions to this issue, which variously serve to explicate the connections between city and cinema, are introduced, framed by this sense of cinematicity.

Miraculous Mathematics: André Bazin's Film Theory

Andre Bazin's film theory is filled with scientific metaphors based on his secular education between 1933 and 1938 in La Rochelle at the Ecole Normale d'Instituteurs. There, he excelled in a wide range of subjects such as biology, physics, chemistry, and, of course, mathematics. Inasmuch as Bazin's handling of art and religion deeply shaped his film theory, in this essay I shall limit myself to his use of algebra, arithmetic, calculus, and analytic geometry to acknowledge his debt to Henri Bergson's philosophy, discuss his views on Henri-Georges Clouzot's policier Les Diaboliques (1955), and explain his admiration for Vittorio De Sica's early neorealist films such as The Bicycle Thief (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D. (1952). My own discovery is that Bazin's mathematical references from calculus and analytic geometry throw light on the radical nature of Bazin's neorealism as a revolutionary humanism.1 Its openness toward fantasy, ambiguity, and contingency is worth examining in detail. Due to Bazin's penchant for paradoxes, my rereading of De Sica's early neorealism will show that miracles and mathematics interrogate each other in the context of a daily life open to childlike wonder, self-questioning, and social consciousness.From Biology to MathematicsThe scientific discipline of biology studies everything that is alive and enables new life. Biology also looks at human beings with the same detached attitude usually reserved for the study of animals or plants. By so doing, it aligns itself with the indifferent look of the camera's nonhuman eye or lens, which can only see the world from the outside and equalizes everything it intercepts. Due to his passion for biology-the science of life-Bazin had little use for the static tendencies of ancient mathematics based on Euclidean geometry in a timeless space. Bazin upheld a Bergsonian preference for the temporality of modern mathematics through calculus, a method of computation that was originally developed by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson wrote:We believe that if biology could ever get as close to its object as mathematics does to its own, it would become, to the physics and chemistry of organized bodies, what the mathematics of the moderns have proved to be in relation to ancient geometry. The wholly superficial displacement of masses and molecules studied in physics and chemistry would become, in relation to that inner vital movement (which is transformation and not translation) what the position of the moving object is to the movement of that object in space.2Here Bergson compares biology's contingencies to calculus's handling of motion because of his interest in the creative evolution of dynamic and organic wholes over static and interchangeable parts. Bazin extends Bergson's analogy between biology and calculus to his conception of cinema as a spatiotemporal modeling system based on automatism and randomness. The philosopher's turn-of-the-century work had the most influence on Bazin even though it preceded the popularization of quantum physics in the 1920s and 1930s, of which the film theorist was deeply aware. In his introduction to Bergson and Modern Thought (1987), Andrew C. Papanicolaou points out that Bergson'smatter should be viewed as comprised of modifications, perturbations, changes of tension or of energy, and nothing else. In such a world . . . energies are pulsational (quantized), entries cease to be simply located (and gain wave characteristics) and indetermination becomes a fundamental feature of micro-events. (Bergson in fact urged physical scientists to look for measurable indetermination in physical nature.) It is thus, as physicist Louis de Broglie pointed out, no exaggeration to hold that in Bergson we find Heisenberg before Heisenberg, Bohr before Bohr.3Papanicolaou's history of science, with the French Catholic physicist Louis de Broglie between Bergson and the Danish School of Heisenberg and Bohr, fits with how Bazin included randomness and indeterminacy in his definition of modernity. …

“More Than Cool Reason Ever Comprehends”: Shakespeare, Imagination and Distributed Auteurism in A Matter of Life and Death

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), American servicemen take on the parts of the bungling thespians in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . The rude mechanicals’ rehearsal scene provides the filmmakerswith the occasion to contrast the British and American movie industries at the end of World War 2. Whereas both Powell and Pressburger and the British film industry flourished during the war, entering into what is often referred to as a golden age of British cinema, the cultural and financial dominance of Hollywood remained a powerful threat. Powell and Pressburger mobilize Shakespeare in order, first, to align their films with the English literary tradition and, second, to assertthe superiority of the artistic imagination over the commercial one, whichthey associate with Hollywood. Additionally, their version of Dream’s rehearsal scene represents Powell and Pressburger’s own conception of cinema as a fundamentally collaborative art. This conception answers to a theory of distributed auteurism , in which the vision of the director—or, in the case of Powell and Pressburger, the director and screenwriter—is not merely articulated but also clarified, modified, or complicated by the actions of others working on the film.

An Historical Examination of the Film Theories and Avant-Garde Mediation of Slavko Vorkapich in Hollywood

Early film theorist Slavko Vorkapich, a talented European emigre who became one of the first avant-garde filmmakers in the United States, articulated his conception of cinema as a unique, distinctive artistic endeavor. I will historically examine extensive original primary archival materials from the Slavko Vorkapich Collection to historically contextualize his film theories, montage techniques, and investigate how he envisioned his cinematic philosophy and visual aesthetic in his theoretical writings on motion pictures regarding “Film As A Visual Language,” “The Motion Picture as an Art” and “Motion and the Art of Cinematography” in 1926 which he went on to stylistically employ in his independent avant-garde films, such as The Life and Death of 9413 ? A Hollywood Extra (Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey [with Gregg Toland]; US, 1928), and in montage sequences for an extensive number of Hollywood studio films, including What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, RKO Pathe; US, 1932). Vorkapich’s diverse array of work embodies the dynamic representation of his aesthetic philosophy encompassed in both his studio and independent productions. Notable is that he manages to successfully bridge the conceptual economic and artistic abyss between the dominant commercial industry and the avant-garde. Moreover, an analysis of montage sequences in the commercial film What Price Hollywood? reveals how his avant-garde stylistic mediation functions to transform the overall narrative film text by appropriating his innovative experimental aesthetic techniques expounded on in his film theories within the mainstream commercial production environment of the classical Hollywood studio system.

Walking the edge: performance, the cinematic body and the cultural mediator in Ivan Sen's Mystery Road

This article examines the powerful performance of actor Aaron Pedersen in Ivan Sen's 2013 film, Mystery Road, exploring his performance and his role as a key to the cinematic and cultural significance of the film. Through an analysis of pivotal scenes of the film and drawing on a wide range of interviews with director and actor, the article argues that Mystery Road brings a complexity and cultural resonance to the role of an inter-cultural mediator that breaks new ground in Australian cinema. Exploring questions of genre, embodied performance and an aesthetics of sparseness, the article argues that Sen reframes the familiar cultural trope of the Indigenous person ‘caught between two cultures’, rendering that figure as an active bicultural negotiator. The concept of the cinematic body is deployed to explore energetic dimensions of Pedersen's performance. The article argues that the cinematic construction of that energetic connection with spectators relies on a directorial conception of cinema that is flexible, innovative, cinematically ambitious and culturally challenging. The article works from inside the energetic dynamics of performance and its cinematic construction to examine the challenges the film makes to Australian cinema.

Film and/as Devotion: Bruno Dumont’s Enworlded Cinema

I am trying to be a filmmaker [... ] I despise the religious, the clerical. I think that there is something profound in human beings, something mysterious, bound to the sacred. The sacred is also in the profane [... ]Bruno DumontFrom the wide-screen environs of Bailleul that open upon and dwarf the tiny human in L'Humanite (Humanity, 1999) to the recurrence of the vast, impassive California desert in Twentynine Palms (2003) or the windswept expanse of the Cote d'Opale in Hors Satan (Outside Satan, 2011), the films of French director Bruno Dumont level the precedence of the human over the environmental. Dumont's characters often find themselves engulfed by the physicality of their surroundings or subject to violent actions that lie beyond their own control. In these terms, the director's selfconfessed shock tactics frequently test our ability to look without looking away- from viscerally charged scenes of human violence, rape and suffering that take place within his beautifully detailed worlds.1To date, much of the existing scholarship on Dumont has been divided between those critics who explore his films as philosophical meditations on topics such as religion, secularism and art but elide their embodied effects and those who associate his films with a sensory, non-representational order in which narrative comprehension and reflective engagement are all but redundant.2 In either case, the intellectual, religious and artistic implications of Dumont's remain severed from its sensorial appreciation. In this article, I will attempt to breach these divisions by considering how the feeling of Dumont's is bound up with both his privileging of the natural world and his conscious re-working of various religious and artistic frameworks. To develop this argument, I draw upon Nathaniel Dorsky's critically neglected concept of cinema to better understand Dumont's own enactments of and/as devotion.3 Concentrating my analyses on Hors Satan, I examine how Dumont's materialist aesthetic, together with his considered emphases on duration, stillness and the painterly tableau, incite our contemplation of and affective to other bodies, selves, landscapes and objects, as well as to the sensuality of itself.As the title of this article indicates, my understanding of and/as need not be attached to exclusively religious or sacred subject matter. Despite the Biblical allusions and figurations of prayer that recur in Hors Satan, it is the expression of a worldly that I am most interested in with regards to Dumont, especially as his activates what Vivian Sobchack calls the passion of the and the grace of [a] common material in film.4 Finally, this article will consider how Dumont's de-centering of the human need not only be framed through destruction, violence and horror. While negative affects pervade Dumont's work, his can appeal to us in intimate, vital and enworlded ways that have yet to be fully explored.DevotionIn his book Devotional Cinema, the American experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky detaches devotion from its traditional theological connotations to extend it to film itself [as] the spirit or experience of religion.5 According to Dorsky, is an alchemical medium that has the to transform our everyday reality into moments of revelation or aliveness.6 Dorksy mobilises as a model for human and for cinematic being. This model of being speaks to films' potential to be transformative, to be an evocation of spirit, and to become a form of devotion.7 For Dorsky, devotional arises from the way a filmmaker use[s] itself'.8 As such, his book invokes a number of specific formal features: a tendency towards topics that relate to the mystical or the mysterious; a foregrounding of the vibrancy of the surface, together with intimations of depth (the screen, in union with its subject matter, becomes a luminous square-a reflecting pool of surface and depth); an attention to materiality (human and cinematic) and a distinct temporal structure. …

Derrida and the Cinematograph: Or the Culture That We Don’t Have

Derrida and the Cinematograph:Or the Culture That We Don’t Have Joana Masó (bio) I saw everything, the French films made during the Occupation, and especially the American films that returned after 1942. I would be totally incapable of listing the titles of the films, but I remember the sort of films I saw. … I have a passion for the cinema; it’s a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not the least memory for cinema. It’s a culture that leaves no trace in me. It’s virtually recorded, I’ve forgotten nothing, I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of the titles of films from which I don’t remember a single image. … During periods when I go to the movies a lot, particularly when I’m abroad in the United States where I spend my time in movie theaters, a constant repression erases the memory of these images that nonetheless fascinate me. —Jacques Derrida (2001) [End Page 63] I have watched all kinds of movies, but I would not be able to quote them. I haven’t forgotten anything of those movies, yet their memory has left no traces. Thus, from this memory, the memory of cinema, traces did not remain. Through this aporetic rhetoric, Derrida confesses that when he remembers films, he retains a memory of the past, although the explicit traces of this past disappear. He confesses this by suggesting that cinema would be the privileged medium that enables memory not to leave traces. What is interesting in Derrida’s interview with Antoine de Baeque and Thierry Jousse in Cahiers du cinéma is not only his avowal concerning cinema—he doesn’t possess a mastery over the heritage of the cinematic culture but does enjoy an intense familiarity with dark movie theaters—but also the very singular role of the cinematic image within the deconstruction of visual arts. Since the trace is one of the major figures of writing Derrida constantly uses in texts that discuss visual arts in general, such as painting, drawing, and photography, one should be surprised to learn that cinema, singularly, leaves no traces, whereas in deconstruction “the arts” are generally discussed in terms of the trace. The cinematic image, as Derrida elucidates in this interview, seems to entail a radical exteriority vis-à-vis this singular form of inscription. In other words, not only does the cinematic image not leave traces, not only does it not trace (as drawing and painting or photography do) but, according to Derrida, it appears to be deeply divergent from the writing model that he had proposed based on a concept of trace or text that was not reducible to alphabetic writing, to writing on the page, to writing in a book. … I’ve said that everything is trace, that the world was trace, that experience was trace, that this gesture is trace, that voice is a writing, that voice is a system of traces, that there is nothing outside the text, and that in a certain sense nothing borders, from the exterior, this experience of the trace.1 If “everything is trace,” if “the world [is] trace,” if “experience [is] trace,” how do we think through the absence of cinema’s traces? Does it mean that cinema doesn’t strictly belong to a type of scriptural model—that of the trace—and escapes from the borders of that which Derrida tells us is borderless, that is, the logic of writing? Within this generalized and archi-global logic of trace, where nothing borders and thus exceeds the text to an exterior, how is it that the cinematic image alone can be an exception to this law? How does one understand Derrida’s conception of cinema as a type of medium, a medium of the impermanence of images, one that he says produces “an emotion that is completely different from [End Page 64] that of reading, which imprints a more present and active memory in me”?2 “Books,” he admits, “didn’t do the same thing for me.”3 Instead of the backdrop of writing’s “active memory...

Orality and Objectification: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Filmmakers and Translators

Orality and Objectification:Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Filmmakers and Translators Benoît Turquety (bio) Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub are filmmakers of principle. Since the beginning of the 1960s, they have been constructing a highly coherent body of work, based on a certain number of very precise, concrete laws. Some of those rules have changed with time and history; others have remained untouched, rigorously observed from the first film until today. They are not an artificial set of constraints, designed to complicate a game that would otherwise be too simple; rather, they define the artist’s position in the world, in the historical moment and political situation in which they live and work, the place where they stand. Some of those rules are explicit: for instance, the sound on the film has to be the sound produced there and then, when the film was shot. There can be no exception. Other rules are less clearly formulated. For example, all Huillet and Straub films originated from a previous work. There is always a text before there is the film, out of which the film emerges. Probably not a single line was ever spoken by a character in a film by Huillet and Straub that was not a quote. That is not really a law; Danièle Huillet would probably have said that it is basically humility. In any case, it’s the way they worked: they needed something to react to, something that would resist them, for which they would feel both brotherhood and strangeness, admiration and anger. So all their films have been adaptations1, in a very specific sense—whether from Heinrich Böll, Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Cesare Pavese, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Cézanne, Elio Vittorini, etc. In this perspective, one could argue, as Barton Byg did in his 1995 book on Huillet and Straub’s work, that it exemplifies a conception of “film as translation” (Byg 199). And it is true that the two actions of translating a text and of adapting it for film share common points and problems. But in fact, Huillet and Straub have had to become translators in the narrowest sense of the word. Because of the place of previous texts in the construction of their films, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub have had to build, from the very beginning, a cinematic approach to language that would be coherent with their poetics—and politics—as a whole. This implies considering language in all of its material forms and presence within film: as sound [End Page 47] and as image, as spoken word and as subtitles. Both are important objects of reflection for Huillet and Straubt, as both crucially engage the artists’ and the spectators’ relations to language as well as to film form in general. In their films, attention to language as sound and meaning involves questions of grammar as well as a precise organization of rhythm and diction; and subtitles involve translation and the configuration of the spectators’ gaze on the screen. In all those dimensions, the basic principle of Huillet and Straub’s approach is the only possible kind of respect to the original work: neither fidelity nor interpretation, but absolute literalness. In that, they are truly Benjaminian filmmakers, though their essays of reference may be more “The Task of the Translator” than “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In fact, as we will see, “The Storyteller” could also be considered a major reference for understanding their conception of cinema as essentially belonging to oral culture. This double aesthetic and political bind to the materiality of language and to orality led the filmmakers to give a very specific role to translation in their work. Dubbing as Murder Huillet and Straub’s particular conception of the place and function of language in film can be perceived through their relations to dubbing and subtitling. They have had many times throughout their career to defend their position on this matter. The first case, and probably the most resounding one, occurred during the post-production of Les Yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer...

Derrida and the Cinematograph: Or the Culture That We Don't Have

I saw French films made during Occupation, and especially American films that returned after 1942. I would be totally incapable of listing titles of films, but I remember the. sort of films I saw. ... I have a passion for cinema; it's a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not least memory for cinema. It's a culture that leaves no hace in me. It's virtually recorded, I've forgotten nothing I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of titles of films from which I don't remember a single image. . . . During periods when I go to movies a lot, particularly when I'm abroad in United States where I spend my time in movie theaters, a constant repression erases memory of these images that nonetheless fascinate me.-Jacques Derrida (2001)I have watched all kinds of movies, but I would not be able to quote them. I haven't forgotten anything of those movies, yet their memory has left no traces. Thus, from this memory, memory of cinema, traces did not remain.Through this aporetic rhetoric, Derrida confesses that when he remembers films, he retains a memory of past, although explicit traces of this past disappear. He confesses this by suggesting that cinema would be privileged medium that enables memory not to leave traces. What is interesting in Derrida's interview with Antoine de Baeque and Thierry Jousse in Cahiers du anemais not only his avowal concerning cinema-he doesn't possess a mastery over heritage of cinematic culture but does enjoy intense familiarity with dark movie theaters-but also very singular role of cinematic image within deconstruction of visual arts.Since trace is one of major figures of writing Derrida constantly uses in texts that discuss visual in general, such as painting, drawing, and photography, one should be surprised to learn that cinema, singularly, leaves no traces, whereas in deconstruction the arts are generally discussed in terms of trace. The cinematic image, as Derrida elucidates in this interview, seems to entail a radical exteriority vis-a-vis this singular form of inscription. In other words, not only does cinematic image not leave traces, not only does it not trace (as drawing and painting or photography do) but, according to Derrida, it appears to be deeply divergent from writing model that he had proposed based ona concept of trace or text that was not reducible to alphabetic writing, to writing on page, to writing in a book. . . . I've said that is that world was that was that this gesture is that voice is a writing, that voice is a system of traces, that there is nothing outside text, and that in a certain sense nothing borders, from exterior, this of trace,'If everything is trace, if the world [is] trace, if experience [is] trace, how do we think through absence of cinema's traces? Does it mean that cinema doesn't strictly belong to a type of scriptural model-that of trace-and escapes from borders of that which Derrida tells us is borderless, that is, logic of writing? Within this generalized and archi-global logic of where nothing borders and thus exceeds text to exterior, how is it that cinematic image alone can be exception to this law? How does one understand Derrida's conception of cinema as a type of medium, a medium of impermanence of images, one that he says produces an emotion that is completely different from that of reading, which imprints a more present and memory in me?2 Books, he admits, didn't do same thing for me.3Instead of backdrop of writing's active memory-which seems closer to Derrida's concerns when he encounters Rem- brandt's drawings or Valerio Adami's, Jean Atlan's, and Salvatore Puglia's paintings-Derrida associates cinematic image with a type of passivity. …

The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism by Delphine Bénézet

Reviews 249 Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC). On this level, the book breaks significant new ground: we see, for example, how short stories drafted in one decade resurface in screenplays composed twenty or thirty years later, or how Rohmer conceived his role as a pedagogue in his Sorbonne University courses on mise-en-scène. Material is grouped thematically when appropriate: chapter 5, for example, broaches work done for French educational television in the 1960s, while chapter 7 looks at the German intermezzo of the 1970s when Rohmer wrote a doctoral thesis on Murnau, shot La marquise d’O..., and staged Catherine von Heilbronn. Elsewhere the coherence is provided by the cycles that afforded Rohmer international stardom, with excellent pages on the Contes moraux’s reception.Writing with acumen and stylistic consistency, Baecque and Herpe achieve in this scrupulously researched volume the paradoxical feat of writing the definitive biography of a pseudonymous subject, a director whose low-budget modus operandi remains one of the miracles of modern film production. Johns Hopkins University Derek Schilling Bénézet, Delphine. The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism. New York: Wallflower, 2014. ISBN 978-0-231-16975-2. Pp. 160. $25. From the beginning pages, the book establishes itself against existing research on Varda’s shorts, features, and artistic projects, and sets out to“redress gaps and absences in the scholarship, to revisit neglected portions of Varda’s production [...] to re-situate these within their cultural and political context,” and “to analyze Varda’s eclectic yet consistent conception of cinema”(4–5).It is composed of an introduction,five chapters, well-chosen screen shots, conclusion, filmography, bibliography and index. The introduction situates the book’s content and scope within Vardian studies and in relationship to the recent widespread availability of the director’s artistic works. While doing so, it encourages us to consider the director beyond her regular étiquette of auteur and to broaden our understanding of Varda’s artistic production and place in the international realm. The recent accessibility of shorts from France, beyond big-city festivals, has encouraged a growing scholarly interest in this cinematographic form and its history in the Hexagon. As part of pedagogical workshops subsidized by the French Government, DVD compilations (UniFrance), and ready-made short-film festivals for colleges and universities like Le festival international du court métrage de ClermontFerrand , shorts from France have found solid ground as a new terrain for scholarly inquiry and as part of a strategized promotion of France as cultural powerhouse. The Cinema of Agnès Varda entices the reader to explore the short within each director’s own filmmaking career, beyond exercices de style, to take on a more holistic approach when understanding Varda’s some sixty years of art. The book is a solid contribution to this field, though it could have benefited from an additional fifty pages to fully explore the themes evoked. More connections could have been made; for example, a paragraph on Varda’s 1984 Les dites cariatides would have been appreciated; that said, Bénézet is quite aware of the restrictions this type of publication demands and acknowledges such at several times throughout. Of particular interest was chapter three, which studies the recurring theme of marginalized groups by drawing out the extent to which Varda’s socially inclusive perspective, attention to others, and love of new encounters are communicated through her choices of characters, locations, and focus of study. Chapter four continues through the importance of dynamics between people and locations in Varda’s works. Bénézet’s inquiry into Baqué’s cinéma passeur (5), the stroller-historian, and cinema of sensations (100) are thought-provoking and insightful. Throughout, her arguments are informed and compelling, bringing new perspective to both familiar and often-slighted works. Bénézet’s work complements recent publications, such as Agnès Varda: le cinéma et au-delà (PU de Rennes, 2009) and T. Jefferson Kline’s Conversations with Filmmakers: Agnès Varda (UP of Mississippi , 2013). It is, nonetheless, unique in its precision and focus on the evolution of Varda’s continual embrace of upcoming artistic media, technological advances, and...

Éric Rohmer: biographie par Antoine de Baecque, Noël Herpe

cultures, there is tremendous cross-cultural learning that can be generated from reading Monsieur Georges as one cannot help but draw comparisons to the American slave trade. Even the most reticent of young readers will be engrossed by this entertaining bande dessinée and will benefit from the crucial lessons on race and tolerance that it instills. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Film edited by Michèle Bissière Baecque, Antoine de, et Noël Herpe. Éric Rohmer: biographie. Paris: Stock, 2014. ISBN 978-2-2340-7561-0. Pp. 604. 29 a. This biography of the director of the Contes moraux, Comédies et proverbes, and Contes des quatre saisons cycles is based on unpublished archival documents and some eighty original interviews. Baecque and Herpe enjoyed unfettered access to Rohmer’s artistic collaborators as well as to the small family circle that Maurice Schérer (1920– 2010) kept separate from his directorial activities, all signed under pseudonym. Unlike the unruly, peripatetic Truffaut, Rohmer was a faithful family man who led an austere life, free from brushes with the law, amorous escapades, or calculated public appearances . Though his several platonic friendships with women and his paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, environmentalism, classical music, and the Parisian nightclub scene are duly noted here, emphasis is placed throughout on the ins and outs of filmmaking. An innovative system of project development, casting, rehearsal, and lightweight shooting allowed Rohmer to bypass the industry under the aegis of Films du Losange, the company he and Barbet Schroeder founded in 1962. Rarely do Baecque and Herpe venture psychological motives for the director’s sometimes quixotic behavior during shooting, or his longtime refusal to be photographed or filmed; they aim rather to create an objective record, quoting from established, firsthand sources (negative reviews of Rohmer’s films are routinely referenced) and limiting anecdote. Scholars of right-wing thought will take interest in passages on Schérer/ Rohmer’s ties with the self-styled phalangists and royalists Jean Parvulesco and Philippe d’Hugues, and the novelist-screenwriter Paul Gégauff who infused many Nouvelle Vague screenplays with overt misogyny.The authors take seriously the political conservatism of Rohmer, who was a bystander during May 68, while acknowledging those causes he later espoused such as anti-smoking, the anti-nuclear lobby, and historical preservation. Critical assessments of scores of works and unfinished projects (e.g.,“Fabien et Fabienne”and“Les Aventures de Zouzou”) devised across six decades are greatly enriched by the 137 boxes of archival documents Rohmer donated to the 248 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 249 Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC). On this level, the book breaks significant new ground: we see, for example, how short stories drafted in one decade resurface in screenplays composed twenty or thirty years later, or how Rohmer conceived his role as a pedagogue in his Sorbonne University courses on mise-en-scène. Material is grouped thematically when appropriate: chapter 5, for example, broaches work done for French educational television in the 1960s, while chapter 7 looks at the German intermezzo of the 1970s when Rohmer wrote a doctoral thesis on Murnau, shot La marquise d’O..., and staged Catherine von Heilbronn. Elsewhere the coherence is provided by the cycles that afforded Rohmer international stardom, with excellent pages on the Contes moraux’s reception.Writing with acumen and stylistic consistency, Baecque and Herpe achieve in this scrupulously researched volume the paradoxical feat of writing the definitive biography of a pseudonymous subject, a director whose low-budget modus operandi remains one of the miracles of modern film production. Johns Hopkins University Derek Schilling Bénézet, Delphine. The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism. New York: Wallflower, 2014. ISBN 978-0-231-16975-2. Pp. 160. $25. From the beginning pages, the book establishes itself against existing research on Varda’s shorts, features, and artistic projects, and sets out to“redress gaps and absences in the scholarship, to revisit neglected portions of Varda’s production [...] to re-situate these within their cultural and political context,” and “to analyze Varda’s eclectic yet consistent conception of cinema”(4–5).It is composed of an introduction,five chapters...

“MIRRORING TERROR”: THE IMPACT OF 9/11 ON HOLLYWOOD CINEMA

By drawing upon Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of cinema as a “mirror” of society, this article explores the impact of the “terror years” since 2001 on US cinema. Hollywood was the main cultural apparatus for coping with 9/11, which had left Americans struggling in the “desert of the real” (Žižek). Visual content simplifies traumatic events like the terrorist attacks for audiences—often expressing them in simple Manichean black and white terms and thereby offering moral guidance, unity, and a sense of destiny. Hollywood’s response to 9/11 included all these different aspects: It appealed to an “unbroken” spirit, strove to reassert the symbolic coordinates of the prevailing American reality, and mobilised for a response to new challenges. With time passing, Hollywood also incorporated the mounting doubts and dissent associated with this process. As the review of relating movies of the “terror years” demonstrates, the American film industry has examined, processed, and interpreted the meaning of the terrorist attacks in great variety: Ranging from merely atmospheric references to re-enactments, from pro-war propaganda to critical self-inquiry.

"Declaration of Immortality" – Inspirations Derived from Creative Documentaries by Wojciech Wiszniewski

In his documentary Declaration of Immortality, Marcin Koszałka intentionally refers to the style of Wojciech Wiszniewski. Visual creativity is strongly exposed here, both in the style of fi lming and the presentation of the hero. Th e main character in the fi lm, Piotr Korc zak, reminds of the monument-like heroes from Wiszniewski’s fi lms, like protagonist from Wanda Gościmińska. A Weaver Koszałka fi lmed the scenes in the Potocki Palace in Krzeszowice in the manner of Wiszniewski’s long tracking shots. Visual creativity in Koszałka’s and Wiszniewski’s fi lms encompasses the staging, precise frame composition, and their intentional artifi ciality, which does not nullify the documentary their nature. Form in the works of the directors of Primer (Wiszniewski) and Declaration of Immortality (Koszałka) interacts more or less with the spirit of Stanisław Witkiewicz’s art. Koszałka, like Wiszniewski, ‘dismantles’ reality, exposing the illusion of cinema to present a guru of mountain climbing (Korczak) as a ‘hostage of immortality’. Th e lonely hero from Wiszniewski-like staged scenes in Declaration of Immortality is presented as an ‘outgoing star’ whose fame has passed, giving way to alienation or a sense of failure. Th e tension from Declaration of Immortality emerges from the contrast between the way of fi lming (heroic style), and the meaning of particular scenes. Th e cinema of Wojciech Wiszniewski includes symbols, metaphors, and allegories. Th is artistic conception goes well with Marcin Koszałka’s concept of cinema, which – since the making of Existence (2007) – has become more and more symbolic, incorporating Baroque-like formal ideas based on strong contrasts to evoke ‘cognitive discomfort’ in the viewer.

Between Documentary and Fiction: Authenticity and Voyeurism in the Cinema of Ulrich Seidl

The peculiarity of the films by Ulrich Seidl lies in the fact that the Austrian director combines freely the feature and documentary film techniques. This makes classifying his works not only impossible, but also pointless. Nevertheless, Seidl was perceived by critics as a documentary film director until he shot “Dog Days” in the year 2001. This film is regarded as a kind of a turning point in his career, a transition from documentary to fictional filmmaking. In fact it is hard to speak of a fundamental change in this instance. It seems more appropriate to perceive Seidl’s work as the director’s own consistently developed concept of cinema. The category of authenticity in meaning, contained in a definition formulated by the German film theoretician Manfred Hattendorf, proves to be very useful for describing the characteristic features of Seidl’s works. The techniques applied by Seidl in order to achieve the impression of authenticity by the viewer also bring to mind the voyeur’s perspective.

Wang Bing's Cinema: Shared Spaces of Labor

Since the early 1990s, independent filmmakers have dealt with representations of labor to investigate China's rapid transformation. Since the turn of the century, the increasing awareness of the limits of cinematic representations to tackle the contradictions of the Chinese system has led to more challenging approaches, with Wang Bing's cinema among the most effective. This article focuses on Wang Bing's work and discusses it as “cinema of labor.” Indeed, since his long documentary Tiexi qu/Tiexi qu. West of the Tracks (2003), on the closing down of a huge industrial area in the northeastern region of Liaoning, Wang Bing's cinema has created a shared experience involving both the viewer and the filmmaker. For over a decade, he has revitalized the concept of cinema as a tool of investigation and social intervention as confirmed by his feature film on the eponymous labor camp Jiabiangou/The Ditch (2010). With his most recent documentaries San zimei/Three Sisters (2012) and Feng Ai/'Til Madness Do Us Part (2013), shot in the rural areas of the Yunnan Mountains and in the enclosed space of a mental asylum, he has further challenged the intersection of documentary and drama to expose the paradoxes of the fast‐paced Chinese development.

False Movements: Or, What Counts as Cinema for Deleuze?

IIn Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze argues that movement of cinema is real movement and not an illusion or an effect. Cinema, he says, not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image.1 This can be taken as a foundational axiom of Deleuze's diptych on cinema. At first glance, claim may not seem particularly surprising or controversial. But by proposing in 1983 that movementimages of cinema are real indivisible movement, not imaginary or illusory movement, Deleuze placed his conception of cinema in opposition to dominant currents of film theory time.Here, for example, Deleuze's quarrel with Christian Metz's semiological paradigm is already implicit. Metz, as Deleuze explains, takes film to be something that consists of utterances and at very point that image is replaced by an utterance, image is given a false appearance, and its most authentically visible characteristic, movement, is taken away from it.2 Similarly, any attempt to read cinema as being premised on certain absences or effaced mechanisms-as in Jean-Louis Baudry's essays on the apparatus or Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni's influential statement of purpose on goals of ideological criticism-can be seen as further attempts to immobilize image by seeing cinema's movement and time as effects produced by means of apparatus.3 By affirming identification of image and movement and offering cinema as actualization of this identification, Deleuze treats as a false problem problematic of representation that much film theory in 1970s revolved around.4So, does Deleuze merely return us to phenomenological perspective that had been target of semiotic, psychoanalytic, and Marxist paradigms that dominated era? One might think so, to read some of current appropriations of Deleuze that assimilate his work with a return to a phenomenological emphasis on embodied spectators in contrast to an emphasis on codes and significations. But Deleuze's conception of movement-image is equally a critique of phenomenology. As he explains, phenomenology must grasp images as images of objects and therefore as representation, locating movement not in image itself but as a Gestalt which organizes perceptive field as a function of consciousness.5 A movement-image, on other hand, according to Deleuze-and here is where he locates radical novelty of cinema-accomplishes in itself what modern science and philosophy have sought to demonstrate: that there is no opposition between psychological and physical. Due to its automatism, it produces a self-moving image. Physical movement and mental image are one.6As anyone who has read Cinema 1 knows, origin of this claim that movement and image are equivalent is attributed to Henri Bergson's in Matter and Memory (1896).7 But to make claim that cinema consists of movement-images, Deleuze must also take up an argument with Bergson himself. In Creative Evolution (1907), published eleven years after Matter and Memory, Bergson described cinema as very model for false movement, commonsensical if mistaken notion that movement can be recomposed from immobile sections in time.8 According to Deleuze, Bergson's mistake, his failure to recognize cinema as an ally, could be explained by fact that in first decade of cinema when he was writing, cinema was not yet cinema, or rather, it concealed its essence that would only emerge with development of montage and mobile camera. This idea of a primitive cinema that precedes discovery of editing is by no means unfamiliar-indeed, it can be found in most traditional histories of cinema-but for Deleuze it has a specific meaning that he derives from Bergson. According to Deleuze, movement in earliest films does not inhere in image as such. The origins of cinema disguised its true novelty by aligning screen with a view. …

El concepto de «campo cinematográfico»

Sociological theories has defined cinema like a institution: filmology, Christian Metz, Ian Jarvie and Noel Burch explain cinema like a system. However, their conclusions only managed to define the cinema institution shares. We have to go to the institutional theory of Art that defines its object of study like a social construction inside of art circle. All these concepts refer us to a sociological analysis of the intellectual creation. It's necessary to understand how intellectuals construct this concepts (cinema or art). The concept of domain of Pierre Bourdieu is essential to analyze how the theory and the historiography construct the concept of cinema.